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Blizzard has just announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty won't be released this year. From their announcement: "Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service. ... As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we'll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series' legacy in the first half of 2010."

Don't forget they've been bought out, so they're not the Blizzard they used to be. It could be that "Blizzard" is working on some DRM which has really been disguised as Battle.net (i.e. you have to connect to it to verify your installation). Watch your step "Blizzard", because it wont be hard for hackers to offer the LAN support you were so quick to deny your fans, nor will it be difficult to set up a pirate server that out-competes the "wonderful experience" battle.net might have in store.

I wouldn't call myself pro-DRM, but I'm just glad that battle.net has remained free--you know they could charge a nominal fee and people would still be all over it. As a paying customer with a broadband connection, I'm willing to live without LAN play so that Blizzard makes the money I'm sure they deserve. Modern broadband ensures that there's essentially no bandwidth impediment to everyone using battle.net in the same location anymore (as others have pointed out).

You say that until at 6pm one evening your ISP suddenly starts throttling your net connection to "imrpove" customer service. And you either lag out of a game, or get your arse kicked because you can no longer defend your self.

Was already skipping Starcraft 2 due to the multiple releases they're planning to gouge the consumer. I would not be at all surprised to find Battlenet is mandatory. The sad thing is there ARE still people out there with no constant access to the internet. Where my mother-in-law lives, your option is dialup. LIMITED dialup. You get 100 hours a month. Over that you're charged something like $3 an hour!

I'm no longer in uniform, but I can tell you what the situation will be - keep playing Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, or get other games that don't require internet access. I got out a few months back, shortly after the announcement that neither SC2 nor D2 would have LAN support. Coming along with the various console games that disallow direct-link or LAN play, it had generated a lot of ill will for various software companies.

I was in Germany, and they had one (shitty) ISP that was allowed to operate on base, broadband was ~$100 a month. Once you got to move off it was as good as anyone living in Germany. Generally inferior to the places I've lived in the states, but acceptable.

Off in the desert, the bigger bases have things like cyber-cafes that work for this sort of thing. People will play WoW on their off-hours quite frequently, so

It was playable at PAX last year. It didn't look like it was starved for dev resources- graphics were good (some stand in art still), it looked stable (I saw no crashes), and the game was fun. If it was anyone but Blizzard it would already be released, it was that polished last year. It will come out, and it won't be rushed.

Don't forget that Blizzard is notorious for delaying games until they feel they're done. Who knows, maybe the extra time will give them a chance to rethink the idiotic exclusion of LAN play (though I'm not holding my breath on that one).

Who knows, maybe the extra time will give them a chance to rethink the idiotic exclusion of LAN play (though I'm not holding my breath on that one).

Probably not going by the following from TFA.

The Spin -

"The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward."

Should Be Read As -

The upgraded Battle.net is a required anti-consumer aspect of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of our plan to build control of obsolescence into all of our games moving forward.

Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.

Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.

Past performance is no indication of future gains as all those commercials go...

It is an indication, it's just not a guarantee. I do realize how pedantic that sounds, but really, we're not supposed to try to learn from history?

Blizzard have always said they would never compromise the quality of their games, I can't think of a single one of their titles that has not been delayed, going back as far as WoW, Warcraft III, Diablo II, Starcraft, etc..

This is also a good opportunity for a competitor. Starcraft massively dominates competitive gaming in the RTS genre. Nothing else comes close. I suspect Blizzard's ridiculous stripping out of the LAN play feature is partly to ensure no large Starcraft 2 event can happen without Blizzard's active participation and/or approval.

Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision.

OR... The simple fact LAN Parties of Out of date. Sorry. Why don't you bitch about the lack of Null Modem features that has been around for years.Back in dem days, Of StarCraft I most people had dial up, so Lan Parties were a good idea.... Now it is not. It is not evil, It is just removing a features that only a small portion of people will use.

No, its not a valid point. LAN Parties were not and are not just so people without good 'Net connections can play an unlaggy game. The entire point to a LAN party is the *social* experience it entails. Talking to people over Ventrilo is one thing. Getting drunk while Evil Dead is playing on a projector and you and your friends do something ridiculous in-game makes it all more entertaining.

Shit, I don't even remember most of what happened in the GAMES during a LAN party. I remember more interesting stuff, such as a pair of friends arguing over whether or not pants are facist or hooking up with the girl all of your friends wanted to date but always got shut down because of that ridiculous friend zone that you mysteriously were immune to. Or the commentary we decided to add MST3K style to some B movies while we wind down for the night.

I don't know, maybe I'm weird and had parties that happened to have video games in them rather than "LAN parties" but to my friends and I, they were LAN parties and they were awesome and if it wasn't StarCraft or Command & Conquerer it was a cheap FPS everyone had. Blizzard flat out has made a *stupid* call that serves *no* purpose. It costs them *nothing* to implement LAN play and in fact this very well could *increase* the chances their game gets pirated, because the pirated game will eventually have LAN play. Blizzard issued a challenge and the crackers of the world are going to take it up.

No, it IS a valid point, but you're also correct. LAN parties in person are still fun whether you have bad internet or not. I still have LAN parties with friends.

You CAN still have LAN parties with Starcraft 2 though, so it's NOT a (entirely) valid point. The only difference is people have to own the game to play it. In the highly-networked world of today with roommates and entire dorm rooms being networked together on a LAN, not allowing for free LAN play is understandable.

Your point doesn't make sense to me gameplay wise (value for money) , since
playing with or against 3 of your 'spawned' friends wouldn't be much fun:

You're the only one who was interested enough to lay down $50 for the game, and played the single player campaign (to practice) and play regularly on Battle.Net with random strangers. The rest of your spawned party will most certainly suck at it since it's a deep game, and they had no interest in paying for StarCraft2.

Your point doesn't make sense to me gameplay wise (value for money) , since playing with or against 3 of your 'spawned' friends wouldn't be much fun:

You're the only one who was interested enough to lay down $50 for the game, and played the single player campaign (to practice) and play regularly on Battle.Net with random strangers. The rest of your spawned party will most certainly suck at it since it's a deep game, and they had no interest in paying for StarCraft2.

Wait a sec - your family is _STILL_ playing over the LAN. Do you think that your packets are all going to Blizzard somehow and not just staying on the internal network? The only thing that you need to do is dial back home to Battle.NET for the matchmaking (and yes, probably the DRM, but you were going to buy copies for everyone anyways, right?). Unless you were planning on setting up a LAN party in the middle of the woods without any internet I see this as a moot point.

Generally yes, that's how it works. You are right about when matchmaking is down or your IP is down that you're screwed, but once the game starts you're pretty much on your own. There might be client anti-cheat stuff going on (like with Punkbuster) and the connection will have to be maintained with BNET, but the game data itself will be intranetwork. Given the amount of bandwidth it would suck up I doubt they want the cost of all those game packets when they can just look at the results reported after th

Don't forget they've been bought out, so they're not the Blizzard they used to be.

How the hell do you know that Blizzard has changed from the merger? Can we not make assumptions about Blizzard until they actually release a new game, please?

nor will it be difficult to set up a pirate server that out-competes the "wonderful experience" battle.net might have in store.

You mean like bnetd? Yeah I'm sure a kid running a server out of his mom's basement will out-compete a billion dollar company. Not to mention Blizzard has the legal power to shut down anything remotely competitive in a heartbeat.

Battle.net will be an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward

Well Blizzard, I think you just died. It's amazing. As a kid on a Mac there was a heyday when in a few short years Blizzard put out Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo II. When Bungie put out the Marathon series, the Myth series, and then Oni. When Sid Meyer put out SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000. And then they all shuttered up, sold-out, and then died of money-poisoning.

Bungie's awesome demo of Halo got it swallowed up by MS, and a decade later there are no more Mac games of any repute. Blizzard had rumors of another Starcraft and everyone looked forward to a new Warcraft and Diablo - but the money-leech WoW came out and stopped those promising ideas cold. Sid, who's always had interesting ideas got caught up in that The Sims, that other massive money making scheme, and put out nothing of interest again until, like salt on a wound, a castrated Spore.

WTF. I think the only exception to these innovative Mac gaming companies going corporate at the expense of their initial fans is Ambrosia Software of Escape Velocity fame. Oh the days...

When Sid Meyer put out SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000.... Sid, who's always had interesting ideas got caught up in that The Sims, that other massive money making scheme, and put out nothing of interest again until, like salt on a wound, a castrated Spore.

Who the hell is this Sid Meyer person, and what does he have to do with Will Wright's Sim series?

Little known fact: In the late 1980s, Will Wright secretly wrote a program called SimGameDesignGuru which accurately simulated a visionary computer games designer. Will Wright created a character named Sid Meyer, named in honor of visionary Civilization designer Sid Meier, and the artificial intelligence "Sid Meyer" went on to create a number of popular and critically acclaimed game franchises, for all of which Will Wright has taken credit.

Well, Ambrosia Software hasn't seen much activity lately... I think the last real noteworthy thing from them happened ten years ago, which is like two lifetimes ago in the computing world.

I think the real problem is that developing games is much more labor-intensive nowadays. You can't just whip up four programmers and a visual designer and deliver a AAA-game in half a year any more. You need 200+ employees working on it fulltime (3D modellers, animation artists, programmers, script writers, producers, game

You mean Wil Wright, but point taken. I'll also reinforce that with "Spore", the craptitude and suckiness of which made the 'a Wil Wright Game!' banner on any future EA product completely worthless. Corporate types need to understand that the value of a creative person is lost if they attempt to explicitly control what that person creates. It doesn't take much crap to ruin the good value of a reputation.

Every time a big game company makes a decision like this, or to go with some draconian DRM, etc - there are always doomsayers coming out of the woodwork saying that they're done, out of business, etc. Funny thing is - those companies are still here. And people still buy the products in droves.

I daresay that the number of people who want to play the latest games - no matter the outrages - vastly outweighs the number of people who a) care and b) care enough to deprive themselves.

Blizzard makes REAL Mac games:1. They don't use Windows API emulators like Electronic Arts.2. They release their game simultaneously for Windows and Mac (in fact both versions are on the discs), at least until Diablo II LOD if I recall correctly.

I wouldn't call them a Mac gaming company, but it seems to be a stretch to say that the Mac is not a priority for them.

Seriously. This is Blizzard; they annoy me sometimes, but they're noted for their relatively bug-free releases...The "buggiest" game they ever released was WoW, and the "bug" there was that a zillion people wanted to play, and repeatedly crashed all the servers.

Since when have Blizzard releases been full of bugs? The *one* reason my friends and I buy everything they ship is because they release only decent, near bugfree games. Okay, you can dislike the content. But it is solid content, even if not your cup of tea.

Remember, releasing games that need several patches before you can play without crashing was common use before Blizzard demonstrated that releasing good games (even with internet patching available) is a sound business policy. The same with MMO's. Every b

Are you talking about the same WoW beta that other people played? I avoided the beta but I had a lot of friends who played it. I'm a casual WoW player (down to about 8 hours a week) and I still come across unresolved bugs in it. The most common one involves getting attacked by monsters that you can't attack and they are invisible (odds are they're stuck in some piece of terrain nearby). The only way to deal with it is to flee. Another common bug involves coming across monsters that are evasion bugged. They are standing there, you can target and attack them, but every strike results in an Evaded message.

I'm not saying that the bugs are major bugs because they aren't. They aren't system crashing bugs, or even game wrecking bugs. On the other hand, they are persistent. I've been playing WoW since a few months before Burning Crusade came out, and the same two bugs that I mentioned above were present back then.

If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on. I remember as a kid, I only ever once played a game that required me to contact the manufacture to obtain new disks with a more recent version of the game. Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.

If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on.

Well, that's true. But it's mostly because game complexity has exploded (some publishers/devs pushing games out the doors too early haven't helped either). A modern game (including engine and support library) can now clock in at over a million lines of code. That's a million chances for programmers to get something wrong. And don't forget that plenty of bugs are asset-related - meaning caused by artists perhaps doing something they shouldn't.

In the world of PC gaming, you also have to take into consideration the fact that there are nearly unlimited configuration options for computers. Many people will also blame games when their own systems are malfunctioning (you have no idea how many driver-specific workaround our graphics programmer creates). In crash reports that we get sent to us, we flag users systems that have failed an internal mathematical stress-test, and tend to ignore those. When a computer figures that 1 + 1 = 3, it's pretty hard for a program NOT to crash horribly at some point.

I'm not trying to make excuses for developers who don't properly test and fix their code before release. I know there's plenty of that too, and there's no excuse for shipping a game in that state. But honestly, with the massive scope of modern games, it's unbelievably hard to test the coverage of a feature change you may have worked on across the entire game world.

Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.

Do you seriously believe there were no bugs in those products? Take off the rose-colored classes, my friend. Just because you didn't see any bugs didn't mean they weren't there. We didn't have the great coalescer of information called the Internet back then, so it probably seems that way to you. I absolutely guarantee you that there were plenty of bugs in those products.

Anyone who has spent countless hours creating boot disks and configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys for specific games will remember this well from the DOS / early Windows days. And god help you trying to get audio to work if you didn't have a SoundBlaster card (or one of the popular alternatives). Remember the pain of early networked games, anyone? It was a challenge just getting some of those games to run at all.

I came on here to post the same thing. In addition, had they included it at the onset, they could have released on time, and people could have actually played multiplayer while waiting for the next installment of battlecrap.

Yeah joking aside I'll buy a copy LAN play or not, but I imagine I'll have to end up pirating a copy if I want full features. I've bought something like three copies of StarCraft over the years. I could have just repirated it but it's Blizzard.

Still, I'm sorry to see this. Blizzard has always seemed to have a tacit agreement with players where they don't even try to stop pirate single player/LAN (think the CD keys for their earlier games, where it would take 01234567890123), but then rule battle.net with an

Your mistake is assuming that this is what's best for the company. It's a VERY common mistake companies make... they lock their product down, streamline, take control of the whole experience, move consumers into preferred channels (and every other buzzphrase)... and profit maximize themselves straight to bankruptcy.

LAN PLAY is one of the things that helped make SC1 awesome, either 12 carriers coming down on an in-room opponent's settlement with "...what the...WHAT THE HELL...OH GOD" to early game 'ling rush with "..YOU CHEEP BASTARD THATS NOT FUNNY"....LAN play was amazing. Now if I'm going to have an 8 man LAN in my garage, it's all gotta go through battlenet, sucking up my bandwidth? Screw you blizzard. You've got another 2 quarters now, give us LAN play.

Now if I'm going to have an 8 man LAN in my garage, it's all gotta go through battlenet, sucking up my bandwidth?

That's not a necessary conclusion. Blizzard already uses P2P stuff for, e.g., the Blizzard downloader; it's very possible that Battle.Net will only mediate such connections at the beginning, then drop out.

From my chair, Blizzard would be utterly stupid to require that LAN play go through their servers. Starcraft 1, a decade-plus-old-game, was the 10th best-selling PC game in June [vgchartz.com] in the US. I'm s

Here's how it works for pretty much every console and PC game out there:

Each client sends up their external and internal IP address. the internal IP can be used for routing if the external IP matches. i.e. if you and your buddy hook up halo and play each other behind the same NAT, you do your matchmaking on XBL but your game packets never leave the network. You can sniff packets on your home network yourself to verify this. So unless Starcraft has suddenly become a client server game then your bandwidth is unaffected.

Myself and a small group of friends started doing LAN parties back before they became popular. I can remember spending half the time setting up the network with Windows 95 PCs, making sure everyone had the right TCP stack on their computers, and double checking coaxial terminators for the token ring network we were setting up. All this just to network Doom.

Fast forward a few years and we were playing Starcraft into the wee hours of the night/morning. One time we were doing a "big game hunters" round which went particularly long. I fell asleep and woke to see half of my base destroyed with enemy units just sitting there. I looked up and noticed that the player who attacked me had fallen asleep before finishing the attack. I retaliated but fell asleep before I was able to finish off all of his bases.

You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that Blizzard will give up what could be the closest thing that will ever exist to uncrackable DRM because some people on the Internet are unhappy about Blizzard's approach to getting that DRM.

Newsflash: Blizzard will change their approach if and only if SC2 becomes a miserable failure, and it can unquestionably be traced to their requirement for LAN.

I wish I could say it was a surprise. Blizzard never releases games on time. I try not to look forward to them.

Of course, this could all just be a marketing scam. They announce the game, wait 18 months, give a delivery date 9 months in the future, and then push it back 3 months at a time until people are frothing with the need for the game, and then release it.

I mean hell, they announced Diablo 3 more than a year ago, and they haven't even bothered to put up the first, tentative, never-to-be-kept release date yet.

The suit-speak translation is: "Hey. We actually talked to the network guys about two days before we were going to push this out the door and told them what they requirements were and they downed a 2 liter of Dew, gave us some funny looks, then laughed maniacally and twisted in their office chairs, chanting 'More power, more power, more power...' Also, the legal department said the brain implants into the engineers were rejected and they refused to further refine our new hideous DRM. In light of these developments, we're going to release some screenshots and do a hand wave."

I for one am glad Blizzard is delaying the game to ensure their Battlenet system maintains the same quality as their games. Way too many RTSs release with shoddy or non-existent online support; I'm looking at you, EA (C&C3)!

I don't know if what you are envisioning works as well as you envisioned. Just because Blizzard has bad sales on one game doesn't necessarily change their business decision to remove LAN functionality on other games. They have no indication that you didn't buy the game because of the lack of functionality. What you should do is actually complain about it directly to Blizzard, and see if they'll respond.

Everyone complaining about LAN play seems to be slightly misunderstanding the situation. Yes, by what they've said you will need a connection to play the official way but once you're in game you are only using the LAN connection. They essentially are forcing you to use battlenet as a matchmaking service, even for local games. If everyone is playing from the same room then the connection doesn't go over the internet at all.

And I'm sure some inventive hacker will create a battlenet emulator that will provide true LAN play without an internet connection.

It's obvious to gamers that it's a bad move, from a business perspective, especially to people unfamiliar with the technical side of things, it looks like a smart thing to do. Multiplayer is the biggest selling point of Starcraft so they figure by locking it down more people will be forced to buy the game. They're taking two huge risks with this. The first, is thinking that whatever scheme they are using to enforce this restriction is actually going to work and remain effective, and the second is that they

I've been a Blizzard fan since 1995. Blizzard has had hit after hit, and they've always clearly had their pulse on the community, always designed the games that gamers want. Aside from the bnetd thing, they've done a great job catering to their target audience (one could argue that the bnetd "hackers" / digital rights advocates are not part of their audience).

What has Blizzard said about "no LAN play"?

"we don't have any plans to support LAN," he said and clarified "we will not support it." The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat. Each person at a LAN party will need to log in and authenticate their license. When the game begins, each computer will start sending traffic to the IPs each computer self-reports -- which will be on the same LAN. Each seat will see sub-millisecond pings, so no increased lag will be introduced to level the field.

I expect the next generation of battle.net will support uPNP, and be more NAT friendly than the current one. I expect VOIP. I hope to see better competition selection, including finding games that are low latency, and blacklist / whitelist (or at least plugin) support. I don't expect to see any kind of LAN support, but if their ladder can see all the players of a LAN competing with each other and provide scoring to make subsequent battle.net public games more interesting, I think that's a really big win.

I expect such network authentication means that piracy will be much more difficult and that any cracks that work will have little value. I also expect this to royally blow up in their faces if they fuck it up. I'll tolerate logging in, I won't tolerate anything short of a perfect authentication scheme. They have had a great reputation for battle.net reliability for the last 10 years.

Yeah, good things do take time to make, but it takes even longer to ruin things with DRM implementations. Remember what Blizzard has basically said: No more LAN parties.
Oh and even if you have your friends over, your game will lag by all of you having to use Battlenet from one connection:(

Completely agree with parent. The game is done, now they just need more time to implement corporate requirements like anti-piracy-does-not-work software and "dynamic ads" engines. Or something. Anyway, to me, no LAN, no buy.

You're going from under 10 millisecond pings for an internal network, to an external site that very possibly (depending on internet weather) could have pings of a 50-100 milliseconds or more. It doesn't matter what the size of the pipe into your basement is; occasionally you get hangups and stalls when your leave your local network.

Current Battle.net games are ALL peer-to-peer. If you play Starcraft 1 with a friend over Battle.net but are on a LAN it works fine without lag.

Why would Blizzard need to receive packets other than those sent in logging onto Battle.net, creating a game, joining it, starting it, and then transmitting the endgame results back to it? There aren't any games out there that make the player host that would need to contact the master server with as much data as it needs to send the actual server (you). I'm sure that 50-100ms latency to Battle.net's server is going to be a dealbreaker when joining a game takes 1/10th of a second longer (even when the game itself is fine)

Regardless, this is all speculation. People need to stop freaking out and wait until the game comes out until you complain. I know you people love to assume that "requiring an online server" is akin to "they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor," but nobody actually KNOWS anything except Blizzard. We'll also know soon enough... the Beta will start at least a few months before the game is released.

You're putting this into your little world without considering what it means for others. How about this for an example: I'm in the military, and when I deploy I ----cannot connect to Battle.net ---. It's simply not possible for me to do without running running into legal or security issues out in the field. Instead of playing a 4/6/8 player LAN game when winding down for the night, I can't bring this game with me.

So freaking out about no LAN play is a perfectly valid thing for me to do. SC1 and D2 are still hugely popular for downrange geeks.

A huge number of people in the military play WOW from Iraq, so I suspect the OP is lying anyway to try to make a point.

Um... what? I was deployed to Iraq (an airbase) and Japan (Iwakuni,Japan) and didn't see WoW played at either location. We couldn't get the Internet in our barracks room in Japan, we had to go to the public leisure room to surf the Internet.

Battle.net is kinda critical in this gaming environment. Yes single player is important and lan play is too, but without being able to compete in some organized way online lan functions are kinda pointless. Not everyone has a house capable of holding 5v5 games unless you want to have smelly gamers packed in like sardines, and I don't like playing against the same 5 twits every time I want to play. Good skills come from being challenged by a wide variety of people.

You can play all three races with the very first release. The campaign will be Terran only, but it will be three times as long, no lack of material. Besides, if you're honestly buying the game for its campaign, I really don't know what to say except that you are very, very odd. Don't get me wrong, the campaigns can be fun, but the heart of a game like SC is the multiplayer. I'll probably finish the Brood War campaign some time before SC2 comes out, but it's been a decad

Starcraft's spawn allowed one to play on battle.net, but ONLY with the original (non-spawn) keyholder.
The expansion screwed this up, obviously, and I doubt if they are taking LAN play out completely, they will even bother, but they might try something like that.